Chile is a bewitching place of extremes: millennial glaciers in the southernmost part of the planet, enchanted forests, massive volcanoes, remote islands full of legends, and great wines. We’ll start in the multi-faceted city of Santiago surrounded by photogenic vineyards producing some of the world’s best wines. Then, we’ll tour Patagonia, a mythic land of fjords, mountains and glaciers hidden among green landscapes that give way to the horizon disappearing at the end of the world. We'll conclude with the Atacama Desert, framed by the formidable grandeur of the Andes and the driest place on Earth, dotted with fertile oases and its otherworldly landscapes sustaining an abundance of life.

Popular Chilean Dishes

Chilean cuisine is a hybrid of traditional Spanish cuisine, Chilean Indigenous Mapuche culture and local ingredients, with later important influences from other European cuisines, particularly from Germany, Italy and France. The food tradition and recipes in Chile are notable for the variety of flavors and ingredients, with the country’s diverse geography and climate hosting a wide range of agricultural produce, fruits and vegetables. The long coastline provides an immense array of seafood products to Chilean cuisine, with the country's waters home to unique species of fish, molluscs, crustaceans and algae, thanks to the oxygen-rich water carried in by the Humboldt Current. >>

Chilean Wines

Although Chile is a New World wine region, the wine production has a long history dating back to the 16th century and the Spanish conquistadors who brought Vitis vinifera vines with them when they colonized the region. In the mid-19th century, French wine varieties such as Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Carmenère and Franc were introduced. In the early 1980s, a renaissance began with the introduction of stainless steel fermentation tanks and the use of oak barrels for aging. Wine exports grew very quickly as quality wine production increased. >>

Chilean Patagonia

Patagonia is a sparsely populated region located at the southernmost tip of South America, shared by Argentina and Chile and home to fantastic mountain peaks, vast and empty steppes, glaciers and icefields, and stunning national parks. As the travel writer Bruce Chatwin famously declared, it is "the farthest place to which man walked from his place of origin.” The region comprises the southern section of the Andes mountains as well as the deserts, pampas and grasslands east of this southern portion of the Andes. Patagonia has two coasts: western facing the Pacific Ocean and eastern facing the Atlantic Ocean. >>

Humboldt Penguins

The Humboldt penguin (also known as the Chilean penguin, Peruvian penguin, or patranca) is a South American penguin that breeds in coastal Chile and Peru. The penguin is named after the cold water current it swims in, which is itself named after Alexander von Humboldt, an explorer. Humboldt penguins are visibly thinner than other species that store more fat and plumage in their body. The climate they inhabit is warm in some areas, and intense sunlight increases their body temperature. Considered medium-sized penguins, they grow to a length of 22–28 in and a weight of 8-13 lbs. >>

Atacama Desert

The Atacama Desert of northern Chile is the driest in the world, settled between a line of low coastal mountains, the Cordillera de la Costa, and the foothills of the Andes, Cordillera Domeyko. Consisting mostly of salt plains that lend an eerie white cast to the surrounding dunes, the desert is home to such otherworldly landscapes as the Valley of the Moon and the Valley of Mars, so named for their resemblance to planetary surfaces. NASA has even tested Martian rovers here, basing their observations on the similarities between the desert and the lifeless planes of Mars. >>